The Top Christmas Toys of the Seventies

Parker Brothers debuted the first Nerf ball in 1969, a four-inch polyurethane foam ball marketed as “the world’s first indoor ball.” An instant hit, it didn’t take long for the company to work on a whole range of Nerf products, including the Nerf football, which debuted in 1972. Soft and squishy, these balls cause little damage when tossed around indoors, making them popular toys with generations of children.

In August 1975, Gary Dahl introduced his Pet Rock in San Francisco, Calif. In the months that followed, millions of people bought into the fad, spending $3.95 on a smooth stone and its clever packaging. It was the packaging that really sold Pet Rocks:

every new pet came in a cardboard box that featured breathing holes and an instructional “care and feeding” pamphlet. The first commercially successful video game, Atari Pong was released in the summer of 1972.

The game is tennis-esq, in which a player uses the simple controller to move an in-game paddle, volleying a small “ball” back and forth with another player or a computer-controlled user. Points are won when a volley isn’t returned. The two-dimensional game was simple but wildly popular: By 1974, Atari had sold over 8,000 units. In 1976, the Kenner Co. release an $11 toy that ended up making it over $50 million. Stretch Armstrong was a 10-inch latex action figure filled with corn syrup that could stretch up to four feet long before snapping back into place. The figure remained popular until 1979, inspiring half a dozen spin-offs,

including Stretch Octopus and Stretch X-Ray, before fading into relative obscurity (although today collectors will pay over $1,000 for Stretch Armstrongs in pristine condition). In 1977, Mattel unknowingly set the stage for portable gaming devices like the Gameboy when it released a handheld electronic football game. The object of the game was simple—navigate the running back around the red defenders to score. Simon, an electronic party game, was unveiled at the Toy Fair show in 1978. With four colored sections—red, yellow, green, and blue—

the game tests players’ memories by having them repeat progressively longer light patterns without pressing the wrong color or missing a step. Simon was a holiday season hit, and despite a flood of imitators, the game has retained its popularity, even spawning spin-offs.Developed by Texas Instruments, Speak & Spell was an educational toy that taught children to spell.

The original Speak & Spell, released in 1978, had a library of several hundred commonly misspelled words, which it would say aloud before asking children to spell them back using the toy’s raised buttons. The news release for the toy claimed, “A number of different games are offered to intrigue children of all ages.” Unprepared for the overnight success of “Star Wars,” Kenner Products, which owned the licensing rights for the film’s action figures, also was unprepared for the holiday season demand for the toys.

As a result, children who were given the set for Christmas in 1977 opened a mail-in certificate that entitled them to Luke Skywalker, Princess Lea, R2-D2, and Chewbacca figurines upon their February release. When the action figures hit store shelves in 1978, Obi-Wan Kenobi, Darth Vader, Han Solo, C-3PO, Stormtrooper, Star Destroyer Commander, Jawa, and Tusken Raider figurines were added to the set.

By Christmas 1978, demand for the toys was through the roof, and Kenner made $100 million on Star Wars action figures during the first year alone. Released in 1977, the Atari 2600 was Atari’s follow up to Pong. Just as the video game company had invented home gaming with the release of its tennis game, the company sought to reinvent it with the release of the Atari 2600.

Rather than being a system that could only handle a single game, the Atari 2600 was a console that could run a huge library of game cartridges. The original lineup of games included Air-Sea Battle, Basic Math, Blackjack, Combat, Indy 500, Star Ship, Street Racer, Surround, and Video Olympics. When it was invented by Erno Rubik in 1974, the Rubik’s Cube wasn’t intended to be a toy but a model to explain 3D geometry.

However, when it was released at the Nuremberg Toy Show in 1979, it became a near-instant hit, even though many children had to resort to peeling the colored stickers off of the sides to solve it. The cubic puzzle which can be rearranged in 43 quintillion different ways, became the biggest-selling toy of all time when in 2009 it surpassed 350 million units sold worldwide.

The toy industry’s first successful line of television-inspired merchandise came from the 1973 hit, “The Six Million Dollar Man.” In particular, it was the 13-inch Steve Austin doll dressed in a red tracksuit. Released in 1975, the original make of the toy had cool features like a telescopic bionic eye and a right arm that could lift two pounds.

Because it has its roots in Tic-Tac-Toe, Connect 4 is an easy game to play for all ages and skill levels, a key to its enduring popularity. The Connect 4 game board is a 7-inch-by-six-inch vertical grid in which competitors race to see who can be the first to get four of their chips in a row. 

Invented by Howard Wexler in 1973, the Milton Bradley game didn’t really take off until 1978 when the company began airing commercials for it, but in the last few years of the decade, it was a major success. Fred Kroll bought the rights for Hungry Hungry Hippos from Japan, where the game originated, and brought the game to the United States in the mid-1970s. Milton Bradley bought the rights from Kroll and began selling the tabletop game in 1978. Although the game boards have changed slightly over the years, the point of the game has remained the same:

Use your hippo to gobble as many plastic marbles from the center as possible. Whoever has the most marbles in the end, wins. In 1976, Mattel’s gross-out toy simply called Slime hit store shelves. Packaged in a neon green trash can, Slime was advertised as “toxic waste you can play with!” The toy was a much-safer version of goo, essentially made with food extenders, than the one that had been on store shelves in the 1960s, which caused folliculitis.

Big Wheel is a brand of low-riding tricycles, made mostly of plastic, with a larger front wheel. Introduced by Louis Marx and Company in 1969 and manufactured in Girard, Pennsylvania, Big Wheel was a very popular toy in the 1970s in the United States,

partly because of its low cost and partly because consumer groups said it was a safer alternative to the traditional tricycle or bicycle. The large front wheel also made it a stable, easier tricycle to ride for children. As the late seventies emerged, it was a necessity for the toy to be electronic in some way. Electronic toys had been gaining in popularity ever since the early sixties, but by 1979 if the toy didn’t have blinking LEDs, then little boys didn’t want them.